For the past two years, I am heavily involved in consulting of architecting and integration of system and network design, information security and multimedia streaming. Software tools I use is quite limited as I'm less involved in development myself and as I'm more involved in consulting and designing.

At home, for my desktop and notebook PCs, MS Windows 2000 and XP are dominant. NT and Windows 98 did successful job as clients for several years. Red Hat Linux 7.3 also resides in one of desktops and one of notebooks. Solaris 8 also occupies Sun's Ultra 1 and functions as webserver and Oracle 8i DB server. I'm not sure yet whether I should buy Sun Blade server.

At work, Solaris 2.6, 7 and 8 are my major platforms to work with various enterprise level Sun servers (up to E6800) and disk arrays, with a little bit of Linux and MS Windows clients. I compile and use lots of utilites on Solaris environment and do the same on Linux more often thesedays. The presence of HP/UX, AIX, Irix, MacOX X and Linux are getting wider, especially with HP/UX.

I almost forgot C/C++ and LISP, but do scripting heavily in Perl, Python and various UNIX utilities, such as awk, sed, grep, csh, and ksh, for system administration and automating the process. As for documentation and webservices, using HTML/DHTML and XML are essential with Perl/CGI scripts.

As for documentation, MS Word is an essential tool to exchange with readers in most cases. And I convert MS Word doc to Adobe's Acrobat PDF to be read cross-latform. I still hear people mentioning PS occasionally, which I haven't authored for several years. On Solaris and Linux side, I use Star Office which is pretty good in most situations and its format is quite exchangeable with MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint.

Being a sys admin, I use vi exclusively as vi is the only one available when the system crashes. Emacs is more powerful, but when system crashes, it won't be available to use, so there's no point of customizing emacs as a sys admin; and as I'm not in development any more, the fancy features of emacs is not of much use to me any more. Even so, I miss the full features of emacs once in a while.

Telnet client on my notebook does the critical job of connecting servers I work with. In such situation, most GUI features are useless, and all job is done by text mode.

Computer Animation is still my half-hobby half-life-long-project, but systems integratin work leaves me little time to concentrate on it. Occasionally, I use 3D Studio Max 3.1 and Alias Maya 2.5 for modeling and animation, but it's minimal thesedays, although I'm forced to realize to use commercial packages more often such as SoftImage, Lightwave, Rhinoceros 3D and Amapi3D. I haven't used other modeling and rendering tools quite a while except BMRT, which is an excellent tool to be exposed to a high-end RenderMan compatible commercial experience. I gave up using Pov-Ray while ago in favor of BMRT, but am thinking of using it again.

Visio is excellent for drawing diagram for server layout of my design and MS PowerPoint is good for slide shows to present my ideas. My project page has a download link to powerpoint file, so when any project members want to review my presentation, they can do so.

Notebook is handy to carry around and I put all documents and presentations on my Sony Vaio notebook with Red Hat Linux 7.3 and HP Pavillion ZT1100 with Windows XP HE and just link external monitor to it for bigger screen during the presentation. Another good use of notebook for sys admin is it can function as a text console for UNIX servers, switches and routers. When Wyse terminal is not available, I use my notebook as a dumb terminal and it's more convenient than any tools unless terminal server is setup.

Adobe's Photoshop 6 is the single most important tool for any computer graphics hobbysts and professionals. Painter 6 with Wacom 6"x9" graphics tablet is for freehand artist. Thumbs Plus 4.1 is to make thumbs nail images of all pictures I have. In terms graphics tools, MS Windows has more tools than MacIntoshes thesedays.

Macromedia Flash is for web animation, which became a web standard, and no one can avoid not flashing web animtion. And I found no one is complaining about it yet.

To compile technial documentations and howto's, screen capturing is essential to provide graphical presentation and HyperSnap 4 for MS Windows and wud from X-Windows are what I use.

Streaming multimedia is where I've been in for the past several years, and MS Media Player became dominant in the market. Now I play all media files through MS Media player without using any other ones. I even deleted winamp several days ago, and am not regretting yet. There hasn't been any major or minor projects involving streaming servers, for the past couple of years, sadly.

Video conferencing is also what I've been doing, but the market has not grown much to many's disappointments. Logitech's QuickCam is cheap and handy and there are bunch of so-so softwares which I don't care much.

Video Encoding from VCR or Camcorder is I do for personal record keeping. With video capture board on my PC, Matrox Marvel-G400 TV which is connected to TV and VCR, I encode it to MPEG, AVI, or VCD format and burn VCD for standalone playback. I also scan all pictures I have using UMax 2100U so that I can keep it in multiple digital formats, wich is safe from losing pictures.

Easy CD Creator 5 is pretty good as a CD burner under MS Windows most of the time, while CloneCD and Nero Burning Rom are needed occasionally. DVD-R is getting cheaper and I will get it sooner or later.

I haven't done DVD enconding yet, but I'll get there pretty soon. DVD playback with AC/3 decoder on your PC has a real rocking experience.

Palm Vx is I carry all the time for personal record and number keeping and is really handy. It became indispensible for me now. Thanks Gene for stimulating me using Palm! I might need to shop for new PDA soon.

I also carry Kodak DC3400 all the time in my bag, to capture the moments. Although it's a bit heavy, right moment to capture the instance comes unexpectedly and occasionally I get benefitted from carry Digital Camera. As it doesn't require films to process, just shoot and see works all the time. Without worrying on processing fee, I don't hesitate to click the shutter. Ask me, I'll get a picture of you. 2 mega pixel is good enough for most cases, but mine is a little bit heavy clipping-carry on you waist-belt.

(Aug-8-2002)